Daniel Shays

American farmer and rebel leader

• Born: c. 1747
• Birthplace: Probably in Hopkinton, Massachusetts
• Died: September 29, 1825
• Place of death: Sparta, New York

In 1786-1787, Shays led farmers in a rebellion against the state government of Massachusetts, protesting unfair debtor laws and inequitable taxation. The rebellion raised fears of anarchy among political leaders throughout the United States, motivating them to meet in Philadelphia, where they would draft the U.S. Constitution.

Early Life

Daniel Shays began life in obscurity, born to Patrick and Margaret Shays. For the first thirty years of his life, he remained relatively anonymous; like his father before him, he eked out an existence as a farmer in the Massachusetts countryside. However, in April, 1775, when Paul Revere rode from Boston to warn fellow patriots that the British were on the march, Shays grabbed his musket and stepped from the shadows of anonymity. He fought in the Battle of Lexington and Concord and then joined fifteen thousand militiamen in Boston, where he participated in the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Having survived these two encounters with the British army, a point when many returned to their farms, Shays once again shouldered his musket. This time he headed north, where he served at Fort Ticonderoga, witnessed the surrender of British general John Burgoyne’s army at Saratoga, and joined in George Washington’s night raid on the redcoats at Stony Point, New York, in July of 1779. Shays was not one to back away from a fight.

After five years of service in the war for independence, Shays resigned from the army with an honorable record. He had attained the rank of captain in the Massachusetts militia and earned a reputation for bravery and leadership. The Massachusetts farmer had even caught the attention of the marquis de Lafayette, who presented Shays with an honorary sword before his return to civilian life in 1780. Shays remained a fervent patriot until the end of the war in 1783. He made a significant contribution to American independence through his service in battle, his leadership, and his political activism, and in the process, he became a hero among neighbors and friends.

Life’s Work

The Revolutionary War record of Daniel Shays was admirable, but he remains best known for his role in a rebellion that precipitated the 1787 Constitutional Convention, where representatives drafted the U.S. Constitution. The rebellion began in the western reaches of Massachusetts, where Shays had returned to farm and family after the war. A slumping postwar economy devastated New England and created a credit shortage as European merchants demanded payment in specie, or coin money, from American wholesalers and importers. This stipulation initiated a chain reaction throughout the Massachusetts economy, forcing merchants in Boston and other seaports to call in debts from shopkeepers, who themselves were strapped for hard-to-come-by gold and silver. For relief, the shop owners turned to their customers, men such as Shays who bought much on credit, paid debts in kind—a bushel of potatoes or a jug of corn liquor—and rarely saw a piece of gold.

The Massachusetts government rubbed salt in the region’s economic wounds by enacting high land taxes that fell most heavily on the agrarian west. Like merchants and shopkeepers, tax collectors required payment in specie. Unable to satisfy their creditors, hard-pressed farmers in the west increasingly found themselves in front of a judge’s bench, where many lost their farms or endured the humiliation of debtors’ prison. By 1786, Shays had seen too many of his neighbors and friends suffer at the hands of the courts. No longer could he sit idly by as inequitable laws destroyed all they had fought for in the revolution and the lives they had built since.

As early as 1784, farmers in western Massachusetts challenged the state government by drawing upon their prewar experience of protesting against a tyrannical British monarchy. They organized county committees to present a united front and to forward petitions to Governor James Bowdoin and the legislature in Boston. In 1786, when their energies produced nothing but contempt from their wealthier eastern neighbors, Shays decided the time for petitions had passed. Early that year, he began to organize and train like-minded men in the use of arms. By June, the movement had grown, with Shays and others leading bands of disgruntled farmers to county courthouses with the intent of shutting them down to prevent further judgments against their neighbors. Surprisingly, no blood was shed that year even though the governor had organized an army of 4,400 men with Revolutionary War general Benjamin Lincoln in command. Soon after the first of the year, however, the crackle of musket fire broke the cold silence of more than one wintry Massachusetts day.

Shays realized that without adequate weapons the rebellion had little chance of success; he therefore decided, along with other rebel leaders, to attack and seize the federal arsenal at Springfield. Their strategy was complex, requiring three companies of insurgents to attack the well-guarded arsenal simultaneously from different directions. For the untrained and undisciplined farmers, the plan proved too difficult. On January 25, 1787, one company failed to attack on time, allowing the government’s army to concentrate its entire firepower on Shays and his fifteen hundred men. The rebel attack rapidly disintegrated in the face of two cannon firing grapeshot. Fleeing from Springfield with General Lincoln in hot pursuit, the insurgents made their way to Petersham, where they were overtaken by Lincoln’s men. On February 2, shots again rang out, and Shays’s men, able to offer only meager resistance, continued their retreat. The beleaguered rebels headed for Sheffield and set up camp in a heavy snowstorm; they hoped they were at least temporarily beyond the reach of the governor’s army.

General Lincoln, however, a tough old warrior, proved to be a tenacious adversary. He drove his troops through the blizzard and at dawn on February 27 surprised Shays and the remainder of his men. A brief but intense skirmish ensued. When the sun finally burned off the haze of fog and smoke, thirty rebels lay dead or injured and the rest were on the run. Three of Lincoln’s men were dead; the wounds of others stained the snow. Shays’s Rebellion was over.

Following their defeat at Sheffield, the insurgents scattered across western Massachusetts, Vermont, and New York. Most of the rebels, with the exception of a handful of their leaders, including Shays, received a general pardon from Governor Bowdoin and returned to the quiet of their farms. An improving economy alleviated the most severe economic pressures on the westerners, but they continued to battle the easterners in the courts and by joining the anti-Federalist fight against the ratification of the new Constitution. Shays fled to Vermont after the skirmish at Sheffield. The Massachusetts Supreme Court condemned him to death for his part in the rebellion but later granted him a pardon in 1788. He eventually settled in Sparta, New York, where in 1818 he was granted a pension for his service in the Revolutionary War. Shays died September 25, 1825, still averring that the rebellion he helped lead some three decades earlier was motivated not by a wish to overthrow legitimate authority but by a desire to regain the rights and liberties he and others had fought to preserve in the American Revolution.

Significance

Whether Daniel Shays was a patriotic hero fighting to defend revolutionary ideals or a rebellious subversive plotting to overthrow a legitimately elected government, the significance of the rebellion that bears his name became evident even as some combatants were still nursing their wounds. The rebellion caught the attention of political leaders throughout the nation and contributed to their increasing uneasiness over the future of the United States.

These leaders were already suffering a crisis of confidence in the new government. The Articles of Confederation had failed to provide the nation sufficient power and authority to oversee even the most basic necessities of governing—the authority to regulate commerce, the power to tax, and the ability to maintain civil order. Although state representatives had already agreed to meet in Philadelphia to address these inadequacies, the uprising by farmers such as Shays galvanized proponents of a stronger central government. The Massachusetts rebellion demonstrated the inability of individual states to enforce legally adopted statutes and revealed the impotence of the national government to confront and control outbreaks of civil unrest.

Delegates to the Constitutional Convention arrived in Philadelphia with fresh fears of a Shays-like individual leading a mob against legal authority and order on their own frontiers. Consequently, they took steps to ensure that the new federal government would be prepared to deal with future rebellions. The convention granted Congress the power to call forth the militia to suppress civil disorder and to raise and maintain a regular army. Once the convention adjourned and representatives returned to their home states, Shays’s Rebellion became a significant issue in the ratification debates. Proponents of the Constitution pointed to the rebellion as a harbinger of future disorders if Americans turned their backs on the work of the Philadelphia Convention and opted to continue under the ineffective Articles of Confederation. Fears of another Shays leading an insurrection became a contributing factor in the ratification of the Constitution in 1789. Although Shays and his fellow insurgents did not single-handedly cause delegates to discard the Articles of Confederation, they did create an atmosphere conducive to the formation and ratification of a new, stronger federal system of government.

Bibliography

Brown, Richard D. “Shays’s Rebellion and Its Aftermath: A View from Springfield, Massachusetts, 1787.” William and Mary Quarterly 40 (October, 1983): 598-615. A contemporary account of the rebellion attributed to the Reverend Bezaleel Howard of Springfield, relating the role of Shays and other leaders in the rebellion.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Shays’s Rebellion and the Ratification of the Federal Constitution in Massachusetts.” In Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity, edited by Richard Beeman et al. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. Brown examines the effects of Shays’s activities on the Massachusetts ratification debates. According to Brown, the state government’s harsh reaction against the rebels motivated the anti-Federalist forces, making the vote on ratification far closer than Federalists expected.

Gross, Robert A., ed. In Debt to Shays: The Bicentennial of an Agrarian Rebellion. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993. This anthology contains a number of analytical essays assessing the influence of the rebellion on various aspects of American life in the early nineteenth century. Topics include how class tensions and economics contributed to the rebellion, how the rebellion affected local and national politics, and the ramifications of the violence on Massachusetts society.

Richards, Leonard L. Shays’s Rebellion: The American Revolution’s Final Battle. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. Richards takes exception to historians who maintain the rebellion was a revolt by poor, indebted farmers. He argues that the rebels generally were not poor and that historians have misunderstood the true causes of the revolt. The book examines those causes and the long-term consequences of the rebellion.

Szatmary, David P. Shays’ Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980. This thorough account of Shays’s Rebellion provides an extensive discussion of the social and economic context of the revolt, of the progression of events from the initial protests to Shays’s exile and death, and of the rebellion’s significance in precipitating the Constitutional Convention.